critique

I say, I promise, I’m not sen­si­tive. My feel­ings won’t be hurt. I want you to tear it up! Tell the truth. Tell me what if any­thing is wrong with this sto­ry and I don’t want you to hold any­thing back.

What do I get?

Wow. That’s real­ly good.

Thanks for noth­ing. Just thanks.

At the risk of sound­ing arro­gant, which I’ve often been accused of any­way, I already believe my writ­ing is good. What I don’t believe is that it is per­fect. So, when I’ve giv­en my writ­ing to some­one for cri­tique and input, I want some good to hon­est, this is what I think is wrong with your sto­ry, stuff.

Believe me when I say that if I don’t think your advice will work for me, I will not use it. I don’t expect you to have hard feel­ings about that, and I promise not to have hard feel­ings because you sug­gest­ed it. But, “Wow. That’s real­ly good,” doesn’t work for me. It is no help. You may as well have not read the sto­ry. I’m glad you were enter­tained but, real­ly? Accord­ing to some close sources of mine, my head is already swollen to the size of the moon, so do you real­ly think I need you pump­ing it up even fur­ther? As a mat­ter of fact, if you start pump­ing that hot air, I’m liable to think you’re lying and that the sto­ry flat out sucks.

I recent­ly asked some­one to take a peek at a sto­ry that I wrote over a year ago and for the very first time, I got some tru­ly help­ful feed­back. It was so help­ful that I am busi­ly rewrit­ing this sto­ry and am feel­ing more con­fi­dent than ever about sub­mit­ting it when it is done. This per­son told me that there were some real­ly love­ly parts, and that there were also some glob­al issues that need­ed to be cor­rect­ed. Free to take or leave this advice, I mulled it over for a cou­ple of weeks, and along with some sug­ges­tions that I received via some of the good folks over at the Online Writ­ing Work­shop for Sci­ence Fic­tion, Fan­ta­sy, and Hor­ror, I feel real­ly con­fi­dent about this sto­ry.

Uh oh. Is that my head that bumped the ceil­ing or the oth­er way around.

All jok­ing aside, cri­tiquing, beta read­ing, inputting, what­ev­er you want to call it, is seri­ous. At least it is to me. And as ungrate­ful as I may sound, please just save it if all you have to offer is, “Wow. That’s real­ly good,” because I already think its good. Oth­er­wise I wouldn’t be show­ing it to you.